Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The narrative of the Civil War is not a result of an individual producer who intro-
duces its meaning into society. The Gettysburg storyscape illustrates the interactive
process through which a Civil War battle becomes a meaningful story through
performance at a tourism space. As an event of the past, the battle of Gettysburg is a
historical fact. Yet, as a cultural product, Gettysburg is a fl uid narrative text staged
by marketers and presented in multiple, heterogeneous forms. The resulting narra-
tives are contested by tourists and become subject to negotiation. During the
performance of the story, tourists are not passive readers of the text. Rather, they are
actively engaged by using their prior background, negotiating, fi lling gaps, and
imagining. Hence, service providers do not simply teach history and tourists do not
only learn about the past. Rather, through their interaction, marketers and tourists
perform history by means of negotiation, narrative completion, and embodiment.
(Chronis, 2005: 400)
While much tourism is choreographed and tourists need to submit to its ordering, this does
not rule out moments of resistance and post-tourist irony. Tucker's (2007a) ethnography
reveals resistance by the young participants on a longer guided tour as they toured through
the 'natural wonderland' of Australia. Given that many regard the tour as an opportunity to
meet new people (friends, partners and sexual partners) and have fun, they gazed and paid
more attention to desired others rather than to the passing landscape and the narratives of the
guides, they pulled faces when the guide became overly enthusiastic and they took silly
photographs of each other when visiting the supposed highlights of the tour.
Other studies explore performances between guests and hosts. Maoz's concept of the
'mutual gaze' (2006) brings out the resistance and power of hosts when interacting face-to-
face with tourists. This notion is explicitly developed in relation to earlier formulations of the
tourist gaze stressing that hosts become the 'mad one' behind bars, relentlessly gazed upon
and photographed (Urry, 2001). 'By contrast,' Maoz says, 'the local gaze is based on a more
complex, two-sided picture, where both the tourist and local gazes exist, affecting and feeding
each other, resulting in what is termed “the mutual gaze” ' (2006: 222). According to Maoz,
everyone
gazes at each other in the spaces of tourism; locals return the gaze of tourists and
consequently tourists too can turn into the mad ones behind bars. Maoz thus proposes more
complex and reciprocal power relations between hosts and guests, where power is omni-
present and fl uid, a situated outcome of performative interactions (see also Ateljevic and
Doorne, 2005; Urry and Larsen, 2011).
Other studies highlight the multi-sensual, embodied nature of tourist performances and
place encounters. Obrador Pons, for instance, discusses the ludic and haptic geographies of
beach life in ethnographies of nude bathing and of the communal, process-driven and perfor-
mative work of building a sandcastle with sculpturing hands, fi ne-grained sand, water, spades,
buckets and so on (2007; for an earlier account of building a sandcastle, see Bærenholdt
et al.
,
2004: Ch. 1). Ethnographies of tourist photography highlight how tourist photographing is
enacted, lengthy embodied visions involving touch, body language and talking (Larsen, 2005).
Performing tourism space and places: conclusions
One indication of the signifi cance of the 'performance turn' is that the third edition of the
classic
The Tourist Gaze
'embraces' the performance turn (Urry and Larsen, 2011). For Urry
and Larsen there are many similarities between the paradigms of the gaze and performance,
and they should 'dance together' rather than picking one over the other (as suggested by
